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<title>The BCEL-builder module</title>
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<h1>The BCEL-builder module</h1>

This module includes a modified form of BCEL - with some fixes in *and* support for Java5.

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<h3>Java 5 support</h3>
<p>The best way to see how it works is look in the testcases.  The only feature that
	is definetly not implemented yet is package level annotations.  What is working is:</p>
	
<ul>
	<li>You can ask a type: are you an annotation type? are you an enum type?</li>
	<li>You can ask a method: were you defined with varargs? Are you a bridge method?</li>
	<li>All annotation values types are supported (primitive, string, array, enum, annotation, class).</li>
	<li>Runtime visible and invisible annotations are supported.</li>
	<li>Annotations are accessible on types, methods, fields.</li>
	<li>Parameter annotations are accessible on methods.</li>
	<li>You can programmatically construct annotations and attach them to types, methods, fields.</li>
    <li>You can construct parameter annotations and add them to methods.</li>
	<li>The EnclosingMethod attribute is supported (it is used to let you know the containing method for local/anonymous types)</li>
	<li>The LocalVariableTypeTable attribute is supported (used for generics to tell you the original variable signature)</li>
</ul>
<p>All this is implemented without using any Java 5 APIs.</p>
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<p> The contents of this directory are:
</p>

<ul>
  <li>This file</li>
  <li>src -- contains the source for BCEL, a modified variant of BCEL 5.1 that includes bug fixes and Java 5 support</li>
  <li>verifier-src -- contains the source for the bcel verifier package, something used by tests but not packaged
      and distributed (at the moment).
  <li>testsrc -- JUnit test cases for the Java 5 support</li>
  <li>testdata -- Java5 testcode that can be built using the build.xml script in the testdata directory (see note on this below)</li>
  <li>build.xml -- an ant script for manipulating the src folder, possibly useful if ever merging a base BCEL version</li>
</ul>

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<h3>Development Process</h3>
<p>
We can now follow normal TDD for this.  Add a JUnit testcase to the testsrc folder, plus any
associated test materials into the testdata directory.  Then change BCEL to get your test passing,
when you are happy with the result (i.e. all the tests in the bcel-builder module are passing), you
should execute the build.xml script whose default target will package up bcel (and bcel src) and
deliver it into the lib module, the rest of AspectJ is driven off the version of bcel in the lib/bcel
folder - it is *not* driven off the bcel-builder code (we could choose to change that sometime later).
<p>
Once you have done this execute all the tests for AspectJ, if they all pass you can check in your
mods for bcel-builder and to the lib project.

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<h3>testdata</h3>
The testdata folder includes a load of Java5 code, it needs to be built with a Java5 compiler.  There
is an ant script in there (build.xml) that builds all the source code into a testcode.jar which is
then used by the testcases - so if you do change the testdata code then you should run build.xml
to rebuild testcode.jar.

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